Effectively harnessing the power of supercomputers, like the sustained-petascale Blue Waters system scheduled to come online at the University of Illinois in 2011, will require the coordinated development of petascale parallel programming tools and petascale applications as well as investigation of new computing technologies. IACAT's Center for Extreme Scale Computing is leading the way with projects focused on parallel programming for petascale applications, multi-core and many-core technologies for scientific computing, and multiscale simulation in science and engineering. These projects combine Illinois’ expertise in computer science and engineering and applied mathematics with that of computational scientists and engineers seeking to use petascale computers to advance science and engineering.